How a US President Having a Heart Attack Caused the Worldwide Obesity Epidemic
Fat vs. sugar: The origins
On 23th of September 1955, US President Dwight Eisenhower had a heart attack.
The following day, Dr. Paul Dudley White, one of the leading cardiologists of his day and the president’s physician, gave the golden formula to avoid heart disease in his press conference. Cut down on fat and cholesterol.
His speech was based on the research of a nutritionist Ancel Keys. This speech was going to start a chain of events that would change the diet of American people and, eventually, the whole world.
In the end, the whole world follows what Americans do. As Rammstein said in one of their songs:
We’re all living in Amerika
Public Enemy Number 1: FAT
Heart disease was one of the leading causes of death in America in the 1950s. Ancel Keys had a hypothesis for a reason behind heart disease “diet-heart hypothesis.”
The start of the cholesterol myth
He claimed that an excess of saturated fats in the diet, from red meat, cheese, butter, and eggs, raises cholesterol accumulates over time inside of the arteries and causes them to narrow to the point that prevents the flow of blood stops. Then, the heart stops.
We are all familiar with this explanation. It is jammed to our throats through doctors, media, experts, our family, and many more.
The Seven Countries Study
Ancel Keys, with the help of Dr. Paul Dudley White, gathered data on the diets, lifestyles, and health of 12,770 middle-aged men countries from Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Finland, Netherlands, Japan, and the United States between 1958 to 1964.
The Seven Countries Study was published in 1970. It showed a correlation between the intake of saturated fats and deaths from heart disease, just as Keys had predicted.
The beginning of the war between sugar and fat
Many scientists remained skeptical of Ancel Keys theory. The most outspoken one was John Yudkin, one of the UK’s leading nutritionists. Yudkin was claiming that consumption of sugar was the main reason for heart disease, not fat.
According to Yudkin. It must be a recent innovation that makes us sick, not a prehistoric staple in our diet.
He said that humans have always been carnivorous. On the other hand, carbohydrates became a major component of our diet 10,000 years ago, with the advent of mass agriculture.
Sugar, the simplest form of carbohydrates, has been part of western diets for just 300 years. Saturated fats, by contrast to sugar, was always part of our diet. They are even present in breast milk.
Ancel Keys was aware that Yudkin’s sugar hypothesis was contradicting with his theory. He gathered institutional power throughout the 1960s. He secured places for himself and his allies on the most influential institutions in American healthcare.
Eventually, they stopped inviting John Yudkin to international conferences. Journals refused his papers. He was excluded from the scientific society.
Dietary recommendations
With the scientific debate swinging behind the fat hypothesis, dietary recommendations were introduced in the US in 1977. The recommendation was to reduce overall fat consumption to 30% of total energy intake and reduce saturated fat consumption to 10% of total energy intake.
And thanks to Ancel Keys and his efforts, Americans became healthier than ever, right?
Here Comes Obesity
Just as the time dietary recommendations were released, the obesity rate in the US skyrocketed. I mean the same year. What an unfortunate coincidence.
You remember the very thing Ancel Keys wanted to stop. Heart disease. It is now the leading cause of death in the United States, and it is the first cause of death globally.
But Ancel Keys had the data. He had “proof.”
What was wrong with Ancel Keys’s research?
His study’s most significant limitation was due to its method. In epidemiological research, scientists gather data on people’s behavior, and health then start searching for patterns.
These kinds of studies are originally developed to study infection. Ancel Keys used this method to study chronic diseases, which, unlike infections, take years of years to develop and are affected by countless lifestyle and dietary factors. It is impossible to separate from epidemiological research.
Advocating for a diet change for the whole world is not a task to take lightly. The evidence must be based on controlled trials. You need a group of subjects. Assign half of them to the diet. The other half is the control group. Diet group must strictly eat according to the diet for an extended period, maybe ten years. At the end of the trial, compare the health of those in the diet group versus the control group.
As you can imagine, it is a challenging study to complete. But it should be, you are trying to change how the whole world eats.
It didn’t matter how weak the evidence was. Ancel Keys won with the institutional power he accumulated. His theory is still the official dietary recommendation in the US since 1977.
What Happened since 1977?
New studies absolve fat and cholesterol
It has been many studies contradicting what Ancel Keys said.
British obesity researcher Zoë Harcombe performed an analysis of the data on cholesterol levels for 192 countries around the world. She found the higher the cholesterol levels, the lower the death rate; the lower the cholesterol levels, the higher the death rate.
Controlled trials that were supposed to be done by Ancel before recommending this radical diet change to the world were done in 2015. They found no relationship between dietary fat intake and deaths from CHD or all-causes, despite significant reductions in cholesterol levels.
Sugar and low fat craze
After 1977 sugar and low fat industry took over. Fat was the public enemy number 1, and it must be contained.
On the other hand, we couldn’t have enough sugar. Cereals were a healthy option instead of eggs and butter for breakfast. Spaghetti or rice was the main dish instead of a nice steak.
We needed snacks between meals because we were always hungry. Our hunger was the result of messed up insulin levels thanks to all the sugar that we were eating. Sugar didn’t make us feel full, which led to more eating. It means more sugar, and more sugar means more hunger. It is just a vicious cycle to lead us to obesity, diabetes, and chronic heart disease.
Ancient food vs. new inventions
We still needed fat to cook, but saturated fats were unhealthy, so we invented new fat in the name of margarine.
We stop eating the foods we were eating thousands of years instead started eating new foods that we are told was healthy.
A Simple Mindset to Live by
Before eating something, think about two things:
- How much time has it been since we, as a species, started eating this food?
- How much were we were eating it?
E.g., margarine was introduced into the United States in 1981. So comparing this time to our evolution, it is nothing. Please give it a second thought before eating that.
Sugar. We were always eating sugar, especially honey, but it was scarce. And all the fruits we were eating weren’t as sweet as today’s fruits. So try to eat as little sugar as possible.
This simple can logic guide you to what to eat or not.
Forty years later, after the US introducing dietary recommendations, here we are. More obese and sick than ever, thanks to public officials we trust to give us credible information. But as is seen, they all failed us. It is up to us now.
Don’t believe everything you hear in advertising or what people tell you without looking into things yourself.
You are what you eat.
